My middle granddaughter, Chava, left on a college exploration trip today with my daughter, Sarah.
They will check out Washington University in St. Louis, where her mom went as an undergrad, and maybe Northwestern if they have the time to get to Evanston.
These are elite colleges.
But if I could choose a school for Chava, that rare high school student who loves to push her mind and connect with people who are not just like her, she would be headed to a brand new four-year school, housed in a converted department store in Austin, Texas.
It has 92 students in its first class, charges no tuition, and allows no computers or phones in its classes.
I’m talking about the University of Austin, founded in 2021, with the seed money coming from Joe Lonsdale, one of the founders of Palantir Technologies, a software company.
Bari Weiss, a journalist and entrepreneur who started The Free Press internet publication after stints with the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, is also a founder, as well as the brilliant historian Niall Ferguson and Pano Kanelos, who left as the head of St. John’s University to lead the University of Austin.
Why a new college when there are more than a thousand old colleges in the United States?
These brilliant, creative, successful people who started the educational experiment in downtown Austin had seen the failure of traditional academia and knew there had to be something better.
Their vision preceded the riots at Columbia and the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn all resigning after their pathetic performances in the face of anti-Semitic demonstrations on their once-renowned campuses.
They were emblematic of how the so-called “elite” universities, charging huge tuition and embracing DEI segregation with outspoken vigor, had failed.
I consider myself a centrist liberal thinker. I am appalled by the hateful behavior which has been glorified by the small-minded professors who guard their precious tenure like 20-year postal workers.
One of the reasons Donald Trump won the presidency in 2024 is the rejection of elitist NPR-style thinking pervading American universities and media.
The University of Austin is one-of-a-kind right now in American higher education. If you want to get a job at Microsoft, it might not be the place for you. But if you want to learn from great teachers and exchange fresh ideas which might get you kicked out at Northwestern or Berkeley, Austin might be your place. For campus life you could stroll over to the University of Texas with “Hook ‘em Horns” all over campus.
My dear Chava, you are a leader at your school, a skilled debater, a professional-quality actress at 17 years old. And you have the courage to be a Cubs fan in the Bay Area.
The new University of Austin is a school I would have loved.
Wherever you go or choose not to go, you will make the best of it.
Don’t be afraid to be different.
Love,
Baboo
Question: What kind of school would you want your children or grandchildren to go to?
8 Comments
Hi Lloyd, this particular post caught my eye. Over the last 18 months, we’ve gone through the crazy college search process with our oldest child. What a time to be an 18 year old looking at options!!!! If you told us what this was like in advance, we would have been even more prepared for the chaos! In addition to the academic requirements, he is an athlete (runner) who wants to compete on a team at the collegiate level. It made the process even crazier. I’ve studied this closely, reading a ton, and listening to many podcasts. Check out the Freakonomics series about college admissions. This was nothing like my 1989 experience. At HORST Engineering, we employ people with a wide range of skills and education backgrounds. Frankly, we need more machinists, technicians, and inspectors than engineers (though we need a few of them too!) who didn’t go to college. My son wants to go to college, but the process was not fun for him. Between grade inflation, AP classes, standardized tests (ACT vs. SAT), community service, and the drive for a perfect resume, its a drag. Should it be fun? Maybe not, but it shouldn’t be drudgery. It also shouldn’t be so opaque. The lack of transparency is appalling. The amount of waste in higher education is even worse than that. If we ran our manufacturing business with that level of waste (and overhead), we would have no customers. We experienced wildly different cost estimates between the different institutions. He gave some of those “elite” schools a shot, but in the end, will start off at more of a “value play,” which I’m excited about. The school he chose wants him and with some scholarship, will result in more bang for the buck. They also pride themselves on building professionals (in various fields) who are employable straight out of school. There appears to be less emphasis on theory and more focus on skills. You and I are overdue for a chat. This would be a fun topic, though it would probably frustrate us even more after we compared notes. Anyway, your post struck a chord with me. Best of luck to Chava and all of the high school seniors graduating in the next few months. Like I told my kid, everything will work out.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-exactly-is-college-for-update/
Fascinating, my favorite schooling book was written in 2014 by William Deresiewicz, a professor of English at Yale for 10 years and a graduate instructor at Columbia, where he also went to college for five years. He wrote an essay “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” as seen millions of times online.
His book: Excellent Sheep – The miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
One bottom line: We go to college to “learn how to learn.”
One goes to a liberal arts college to learn to think critically, not to think like those teaching you. And as far as the case for elite institutions, no client during my long legal career asked me where I went to school. They just wanted to know I understood their concerns and had a plan to manage them. Like most aspects of life, education is not what others give you, but what you give yourself.
We are witnessing the Trump admin attacking “Elite institutions” right now, using some of the same rationale of “elitist NPR-style thinking”, so maybe your wishes are coming true. Frankly I think the cure is much worse than the disease.
Wonderful comments. Keep them coming. Scott, I am glad your son is a distance runner. He will need the endurance for the get into college slog.
Bert, a lot of people “in the “system” understand its weaknesses. But It’s hard to escape a lucrative system.
Russ, where did you go to school?
Steve, I did read the piece in the Journal. There is another great article in the WSJ by Douglas Belkin Jan 17th about whether college is worth it. Enrollments are steadily falling snd women outnumber men 60% to 40%. Tougher marriage odds. Another argument against college but other options stink, too.
Read the article about Brianna Hall who has a job maintaining the ASML chip machines. It is in the Wall Street Journal and can be found by googling her name. If she wants to push her envelope and do something we need to keep up have her follow that path. She will be able to travel and meet all different kinds of people and make good money at the same time.
I believe that the main issue is that the majority of high school graduates do not have a solid idea of what they actually want to pursue in college (or even why they should be attending college). At many universities there is typically a core regimen of freshman studies to get students acclimated to college life and possibly form an opinion about which major they would want to pursue. If you think you want to pursue a career in mining or geology, you should be applying to the Colorado School of Mines, not Swarthmore College. I wonder how many grade-school kids that wanted to be firefighters or astronauts actually became firefighters or astronauts.
With the cost of higher education these days, it would behoove students to look at the resulting ROI. I hate to say it, but I think those with STEM disciplines will be in more demand than psych-degreed graduates. I agree with Bert that you go to college ‘to learn how to learn’. I had a cousin that had advanced degree in nuclear physics from Case-Western. His opinion was that you do not use 90% of what is taught in school in the real world.